View full sizeAssociated PressJasmine Longmire (center) of Detroit, waits in line while attending a job fair, Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2010, in Southfield, Mich. More layoffs would weaken the economy further, as fewer jobs means less income for Americans to spend.

OLIVERA PERKINS, Plain Dealer Reporter

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Persistent unemployment has become a seam in the fabric of society.

On this Labor Day, joblessness links pieces of the country from top to bottom like never before, experts say. So many people have been unemployed for so long that nearly everyone knows someone in that predicament.

Indeed, nearly three-quarters of Americans have either lost a job in this recession or have a close friend or family member who has, according to a survey released last week by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

These are people who take in laid-off friends. Children helping their unemployed parents pay bills. Relatives comforting family during the emotional toll of unemployment.

They are people like Loretta Cross, who helped friend Linda Blunk of Parma Heights.

Blunk believed she would soon find another job after she was laid off from a clerical position in the financial services industry more than two years ago. Prospective employers often remarked that she was "very qualified," but they didn't hire her.

Blunk, now 61, suspects they were reluctant to hire someone her age.

With no job and no unemployment check, she and her husband couldn't pay a $700-plus mortgage, $500 in monthly medical expenses and still afford groceries on his $1,300 Social Security check.

One day, Blunk waited for her friend, Cross, to leave work. Then she left a message on her voicemail because she was too embarrassed to face her with this request.

"Loretta, it's Linda," she said, crying hysterically. "We are very, very low on staples, and we don't have any money to buy anything. Please give me a call tomorrow."

The next day, Cross arrived at the Blunks' home with three big boxes of supplies.

"We call her our angel," Blunk said.

Cross has much in common with Americans in the Rutgers study. The survey found that people feel deep concern about the plight of the unemployed, fear about their own job security and worry about the country's economic future.

Thirteen percent of those polled had lost a full- or part-time job during the recession, which began in December 2007. But 60 percent more had immediate or extended family members or a close friend who had lost a job.

"There are an awful lot of people who have had a close personal experience with unemployment," said Carl Van Horn, the center's director, who co-authored the study with Cliff Zukin, a Rutgers professor. "It is not the fault of the unemployed worker in the view of most of them. They're not blaming the victim."

Those views differ from similar studies during less severe recessions, when people were less apt to know someone out of work, Van Horn said. And those people were more likely to say the unemployed weren't trying hard enough to find a job.

The Rutgers survey found:

•86 percent of those working express at least some concern about their individual job security.

•86 percent of working individuals say most of the unemployed really want to work.

Surveyers interviewed 818 people nationally between July 19 and Aug. 16. Sixty-one percent had jobs. Thirty-nine percent were unemployed. The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

John Heben of Akron participated in the study. He retired recently as a letter carrier, but he has seen family members struggle in this economy. His brother, laid off from his manufacturing job for about a year, was called back, but work is slow. Heben's niece, who graduated college a few years ago, can find only part-time work. He fears his daughter, a college student, won't be able to find a job when she graduates.

"I think we are going to have at least another two to three years of this type of economy," Heben said.

Loretta Cross, the woman who helped the Blunks, is the lay visitation minister at their church, Divinity Lutheran Church in Parma Heights.

Cross said as unemployment remains high, the church's ministry has expanded to meet the needs of the jobless. (Ohio's unemployment rate in July was 10.3 percent. The U.S. rate was 9.5 percent.)

She said many, like the Blunks, are embarrassed to ask for help. They were the ones who used to give to the food pantry. Now they must accept donations from it.

A solid punch

to the middle

Suburban food pantries saw the biggest increase in participants in 2009, primarily because of a middle class hard hit by layoffs, said Michelle Wohlfeiler, director of special events and marketing director for the Hunger Network of Greater Cleveland.

"People were losing their jobs at the end of '08 and the beginning of '09," she said. "At first people were saying: 'OK, I'm going to find another job. I don't need help. That is for people who really need help.' As the year progressed, the stigma faded. They were at the end of whatever savings they had. They had already asked immediate family for help."

The Blunks had to ask their son, Michael, for a loan that they haven't been able to repay. It worries them because they know that making the loan was a sacrifice for their son and daughter-in-law. According to Rutgers, 60 percent of the unemployed have borrowed money from family or friends.

Michael Blunk doesn't worry about being repaid. He is more concerned about the emotional toll his mother's long-term unemployment has taken on his parents. His mother has been clinically depressed -- brought on, she said, by her inability to find a job. His father has been demoralized because he can't help support the family. Richard, 72, said rheumatoid arthritis keeps him from working.

"It's very upsetting to see how this is affecting them," their son said. "When I was growing up, they never needed help from anyone."

The Blunks hadn't been to the Parma Hunger Center in months and debated recently whether to go. But necessity overruled pride; and they went.

The center served 3,822 families in 2009, an increase of more than 55 percent from when the recession began in 2007, said co-director Archibald Stevenson.

Effect of damage

deceptively large

Heidi Shierholz, labor market economists at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., explained how joblessness can affect a broader swatch of the population than it appears.

People are in and out of the job market, she said. For example, although the unemployment rate for July represented 14.6 million people out of work, an estimated 35 million people have experienced joblessness at some point in 2010.

"There is a myth out there that if there is a 10 percent unemployment rate that means that 90 percent of the people are OK," Shierholz said. "It is just not true."

Of the nearly 310,000 Ohioans who collected unemployment checks for the week ending Aug. 21, about 60 percent were long-term unemployed -- those who have been out of work at least 27 weeks. Many show up at the Maple Heights food pantry.

Paul Flanik was laid off as a towmotor operator in October. After two months, he could no longer afford to pay his rent, so he moved in with a friend. He said friends and family have looked out for him, sending odd jobs his way.

"It is kind of humbling relying on someone else for a place to stay," Flanik said.

LaRhonda Lewis was laid off from her bill collections job in February. She said she wouldn't be able to make it without the help of friends and family. A friend even drove her to the pantry.

Just a few years ago, Linda Blunk, the unemployed clerical worker from Parma Heights, said she never would have imagined herself unemployed and having to relyon others to make it.

"I used to look down on people who went for help," she said. "I used to think: 'You look perfectly healthy. Why don't you go get a job?'

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